2. Early Philadelphia Theater in the 18th Century

(© Podcast text copyright 2021 by Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.)

Hello! Welcome and welcome and welcome again to the second episode of Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia.

Last time I talked about why and how I started doing this podcast series - go back and take a listen if you missed that Introductory episode. As I promised last time, in this episode I’m going to talk about the Origins of Early Philadelphia Theater, from the founding of the city up to the end of the 18th Century, the end of the 1700s.

Famously, Philadelphia was founded by William Penn in 1682 to be the capital of his colony, his haven for the radical branch of Protestantism he had converted to, Quakerism, and it was to be called Pennsylvania, “Penn’s Woods”. He chose the neck of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers to be a city, one that he named after some ancient cities referenced in the Bible: Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love - which he envisioned as a Green country town, full of honest and industrious Christian folk, away from the oppressions of established churches, and a city that was free of vice and viciousness. He specifically wrote in the founding documents for the colony that there was to be no plays allowed! Violators could be fined 20 shillings or sent to jail.

For centuries untold before the European colonists arrived, this part of the Atlantic Coast has been the territory of the Lenni Lenape, the indigenous people. By the early 17th Century, Europeans, mostly Dutch and Swedish settlers, started to arrive here, living in uneasy competition with the Lenape. And the Lenni Lenape were mostly displaced from the space between the rivers by the next arrivals - these English and Welsh Quakers inspired by William Penn - as well as Quakers relocating from the New England colonies to the north. And then they were joined by more Dutch and German settlers, too, some of them Quakers as well, as others Mennonites and Lutherans. I don’t want to get too involved in Early Colonial History, as it’s usually referred to. But it’s more important to remember that no one came here to do plays - at its very founding, Philadelphia seemed like an unlikely place for theater ever to exist.

Though the earliest Quakers did generally at first like singing in prayer, they were generally against the performing arts – not only because they were considered a "representation" of God’s creation - something that should be experienced directly - but also because they were regarded as Luxury and Idleness - they were not part of the thrifty and industrious life that all Quakers (or members of the Society of Friends, as they preferred to be called) were expected to practice every waking minute.

Spending on theater was a waste of money and time, as far as they were concerned. Moreover, the Theater especially was seen as a place of social distinctions, where rich people sat in better seats than those in the galleries or  the common ‘pit’. This social inequity was anathema to William Penn and the Society of Friends, who believed in absolute social equality. There were no ministers in their church, and everyone dressed in plain and sober clothes, to avoid open distinctions of wealth.

Quakerism, for those who don’t know, was a product of the mid-17th Century flowering of non-conforming Protestant sects that arose during the English Civil War and the Commonwealth led by Oliver Cromwell, when the popular theaters and public stages of Shakespeare’s day had been torn down and plays had been forbidden. When Cromwell died, and the English monarchy and other such institutions as the Church of England were “restored” in 1660, one of the other institutions that was restored was the English Theatre. King Charles II even allowed women to perform female roles on the public stages in London, a French custom which had NEVER  been seen in England before! This era is known as ‘Restoration Drama”, which if you are a Theater Person is now remembered, revived, and appreciated for all its witty banter, its magnificent wigs and costumes, and wonderful playwrights, and above all those wonderful playwrights writing plays about sexual innuendo and comic wordplay - and all sorts of things that drove the Society of Friends crazy.

The Quakers were eager, for their part, to “restore” the days of the Early Christian Church, and knew from the Bible that the Apostles had not appreciated such aspects of pagan Greek and Roman life as the theater of the ancient days, no, no, no, not at all. The Quakers wanted to flee such corrupting and false practices, both ancient and modern. Indeed it was one of the very reasons they came to Pennsylvania in the first place.

William Penn, in his 1682 book entitled No Cross No Crown, condemned his fellow Englishman in the capital of London, whose

. . . afternoons are as commonly bespoke for visits and plays; where their usual entertainment is some stories fetched from the more approved romances; some strange adventures, some passionate amours, unkind refusals, grand impediments, importunate addresses, miserable disappointments, wonderful surprises, unexpected encounters, castles surprised, imprisoned lovers rescued, and meetings of supposed dead ones; bloody duels, languishing voices echoing from solitary groves, overheard mournful complaints, deep-fetched sighs sent from wild deserts, intrigues managed with unheard-of subtlety . . all their impossibilities reconciled: things that never were, nor are, nor ever shall or can be, they all come to pass! . . .  

How many plays did Jesus Christ and His Apostles recreate themselves at? What poets, romances, comedies, and the like did the Apostles and saints make, or use to pass away their time withal? I know they did redeem their time to avoid foolish talking, vain jesting, profane babblings, and fabulous stories.

Isn’t that great stuff? I gotta tell you, while researching this episode I found this book and the entire chapter that passage came from, Chapter 1, and it is FULL of that type of rhetoric, revelling in sensuous detail of that which he deplores. Penn seems to really SECRETLY enjoy what he’s supposedly condemning. He goes on and on about how awful and corrupting and effeminate the theater and other entertainments are! Oh, he talks about Aristophanes and Euripides and  . . well he clearly knows the history of the theater quite well, or he wouldn't be able to go into such detail.  

Anyway, I think it’s fair to say that in the first 65 years or so after Philadelphia was founded, there WAS no theater or drama allowed in its precincts, as it slowly grew and went about its business. 

It started the 18th Century with about seven hundred houses and a few thousand people, but it kept prospering and growing, eventually achieving a population of about 15,000 people by the middle of the 18th century. Now not everyone in Philadelphia was a Quaker. It had a laudable toleration of other faiths, and in fact there was a large non-Quaker people living in Philadelphia. Many of them were Scots and Irish Presbyterians - themselves not generally fanciers of the fine arts - and some were Church of England types, who might or might not be. But some people were evidently sorely tempted by all the things that William Penn had found so  pernicious, or there wouldn’t have been so many rules against them.

To the Quaker leadership of Philadelphia, public order was uppermost, and therefore repeatedly they created ordinances of the city that forbade “stage plays, cards, dice, masques and revels, bull-baiting and cockfighting - [things] which excite  the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness, and irreligion.”  Interestingly, all laws that the leaders or the city or legislatures of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania passed against the theater were repeatedly overturned and repealed by the British government back in England! This is all part of the ongoing high-handed disregard for the American colonists' views that would some day, in the long run, lead to some very interesting tea parties.

Whatever attempts there were to have ‘shows’ in Pennsylvania were mostly popular entertainments in taverns or local harvest fairs: jugglers, rope dancers, puppet shows, or exhibitions of exotic animals. If anyone was going to get up to anything that the authorities might not approve of, it was usually carefully done outside of the city limits proper - either to the south or to the north of Philadelphia, where smaller and grubbier townships could tolerate a bit of diversion and fun.

Now, not everybody was in the No Fun Club, though. In 1723 somebody set up a small temporary performance stage to put up an evening of ‘drollery’ featuring dancing, jokes and tricks. The General Assembly of Pennsylvania tried to get Governor Keith (not a Quaker) to stop the show, but he refused, and declared he was going to see the show himself. But that’s pretty much it.

So, if there was not any theater in Philadelphia in the early 18th century . . . was there Philadelphia in the theater? Well, I am delighted to point you to the 1719 play A Bold Stroke for a Wife by Susanna Centlivre which was presented on the London stage! This is a text that is often assigned in The History of Dramatic Literature classes, and her comedy contains in its cast of characters one ‘Simon Pure, a Quaking Preacher,’ who has lately come from Pennsylvania and who is designated to be one of four guardians of a young lady by a friend’s last will and testament. (That’s the plot of this comedy. “Simon Pure” the Philadelphia Quaker - and no doubt Centlivre and her audience would have been aware of the patent hilariousness of having a Quaker on the stage, since there was no chance of a real one ever darkening the door of a theater at the time.) Simon Pure has in fact entered into the English language as both a byword for authenticity and also for hypocrisy. So, take your pick.

In the course of the play he is outwitted, along with all the other guardians of the young lady’s virtue, and an enterprising soldier makes off with her. “Oh, the wickedness of the age!” exclaims Simon. And no doubt he was correct to feel this way. . . 

Passing quickly by all the usual details you hear in most histories of Early Philadelphia . . . about the arrival of Benjamin Franklin, and the scientific curiosity of his friends, colonial politics, and the early newspapers, etc. etc.  . . . There is an excellent and widely known podcast called Benjamin Franklin’s World with hundreds of episodes that cover all that, of course, give it a listen, please - it’s wonderful . . . We do something else. We jump ahead to the year 1749. When a group of English actors led by two men, Walter Murray and Thomas Kean, arrived in town.

What had brought these actors to Philadelphia, of all places?  Well, here’s the story: There was a glut of young and ambitious actors and theater folk back in London. The infamous (in Theater History circles, anyway) . . . the infamous Licensing Act of 1737 had restricted the number of licensed ‘patent’ houses to only two. There were only two places where serious theater could be performed in the capital city. So, there were a limited number of roles for those young men and women who wanted to be actors. And ambitious but somewhat-less-talented actors who couldn’t get a break in the capital began to  cast about: Dublin and provincial English cities, and then they might hop aboard merchant ships plying the sea lanes of the growing Empire. It was inevitable that some of them would arrive in Philadelphia, despite its well-known antipathy to plays. After all Philadelphia was the largest settlement in the English Speaking world in the Western Hemisphere, after all.

When we say players, well what sort of plays? The usual 18th century English repertoire: A few Shakespeare adaptations, Restoration dramas and farces, ballad operas and sentimental comedies.

Keane and Murray’s company seem to have had only five plays (including Addison’s Cato - of which we’ll hear more later) and three afterpieces in their entire repertoire. What? But they paid calls and distributed handbills and gathered an audience to come and see what they had to share. And because the English Parliament and Administration had overturned all Philadelphia’s regulations against plays, legally they could do so, if they found somebody to give them a building to perform in - and they did! 

They found a converted warehouse on the Delaware river bank, in fact on the corner of Pine Street and what was then called Water Street. (Nowadays, of course, the site would be directly beneath Highway 95, so don’t go looking for it.) It was a building owned by one William Plumstead. Although a Quaker himself, Plumstead was a man of business and could spot a market. His warehouse was hardly what London would call a proper theater -- probably it was just a platform, a curtain and some wooden benches – but, with my modern liberal attitude, I would call Plumstead's Warehouse a "found space." (And perfectly nice for putting on plays - Philadelphia Fringe would love it.)

At any rate this particular theater troupe seems not to have lasted much longer, but William Plumstead would go on to become a mayor of Philadelphia several times, so it’s evident that the political winds were shifting in the city.

By the mid 18th Century, enough Philadelphians were beginning to have aspirations to participate in the growing public enthusiasm for theater of the 18th century . The very fact that theater companies were showing up and finding welcoming audiences for their product signals a change in what sort of city Philadelphia was becoming. No longer did the majority of people there want to be different from the rest of the European world, they wanted to share in the Enlightenment and join what was then one of the most common social and artistic group activities - going to the theater.

In 1754 Plumstead’s Warehouse was once again employed as a stage for another troupe of traveling English actors, a joint stock company of about a dozen actors led by one Lewis Hallam and his wife, who had already performed in New York, Williamsburg, and Charleston.

To assuage the fears of the wary Quakers, perhaps the first play they presented was a tragedy entitled The Fair Penitent, by Nicholas Rowe. But their next play was a comedy called Miss in Her Teens, by David Garrick, a title which no doubt confirmed the Quakers’ worst fears. There were 30 performances in all in the group’s repertoire, probably also including some Shakespeare. A group of Philadelphia magistrates kept a wary eye on the players, lest they show any ‘improper performances.’ But at the end of their run, The Hallam company left, having evidently given pleasure to those who were eager to see them, and left for Jamaica to try their fortunes there.

Unfortunately, Lewis Hallam died in Jamaica in 1756, and his wife married another actor of the company, David Douglass. In 1759 Douglass led the company - which now included about two dozen actors and a group of musicians - and now billing themselves as “The American Company” . . .

 . . . Douglas led them back to North America. And they brought with them trunks of costumes and sets - and evidently a great deal of carpentry skills - because they came to Philadelphia and they built a theater, called the Society Hill. This was just south of Cedar Street, on the other side of city boundaries – what we would now call South Street – and this area was technically a different township, called Southwark. Southwark was aptly named, actually, because just like its London counterpart on the south bank of the Thames River where the Globe Theatre had once stood among the brothels and taverns in Shakespeare’s day - the area to the south of Philadelphia was where more low-rent activities generally gathered, back then. This was exactly what the Quakers had always expected, of course . . . so, you know, they weren’t all wrong.

The advent of the return of the American Company - and the construction of an actual playhouse - of course got attention from the still dominant Protestant bluenoses of Philadelphia of the day. And a flurry of indignant letters can be seen in the newspapers in 1759. In the Philadelphia Chronicle there was one decrying “blasphemous spectacles, wanton amours, profane jests and impure passions.” - the sort of rhetoric we’ve heard before. But it’s a little different than in Penn’s original book. Because I don’t think they’d seen anything of the sort themselves - they’d just heard about it.

But this attitude still packed some punch, politically, because the venue was shut down in six months, and the actors left the area to more welcoming places such as New York or Kingston, Jamaica, again.  

In 1766, the American Company felt it was safe to return again and they built what is considered the first permanent theater in America, called the Southwark Theatre. Again, it was just outside of the city limits, on the southern side of the intersection of Fourth and South streets. It held about 800 people; and it was not a gracious structure . . . it had many inconveniences, such as bad sight lines and many pillars holding up the roof that tended to block the view of all but the front rows.

We have a few drawings of the old Southwark - and one possible one of Plumstead’s Warehouse, too - I’ll post them on the website if you want to take a look at them. Neither of them had been noble buildings - they were a bit blocky and frankly warehouse-y - and failed to attract the attention of any real artists. 

Nonetheless, the Southwark Theatre was to stand for many years as a low-quality performance venue - one that was fondly regarded by local theater patrons, because well . . . what else was there? 

This building, soon to be called by locals the “Old” Theatre (for reasons we will get into in a minute) managed to house plays for Philadelphia’s entertainment for many decades thereafter. 

It was there in 1767 that The American Company agreed to learn and stage the first attempt at a classical tragedy written by an American author - The Prince of Parthia, by Thomas Godfrey. 

Godfrey was a promising young Philadelphian who had received a classical education at an English boarding school. He had been a soldier in his day . . . but was currently apprenticed to a watchmaker, though he would have rather been a poet or a painter, he couldn’t quite tell which. The play was written upon Aristotelian lines and set in ancient Persia - it was quite a ponderous mouthful of words, but nonetheless it was the First American Play ever staged by a professional company in America. There you are: “Philadelphia, City of Firsts!” That was for many years our tourism motto, and I don’t know why this play wasn’t always at the top of the list. Godfrey, I’m sorry to say, died a few years later at the age of 26, so he never wrote a second play. But then we’re not the City of Seconds, are we?

Sorry to get a little flip here, but I’m preparing you for the fact that I’m going to skip right over the American Revolution! What what what? Well yes, but this episode is running a little long. . . . 

Anyway, the famous Continental Congress that met in Philadelphia passed an act that banned the performance of plays during the time of National Crisis, asserting their right of course to disallow things the English Parliament had previously kept allowing. That’s why we were fighting for, if you ask me, everyone talks about “No Taxation Without Representation,” but to me, it was the “Right to Ban Plays.”

When during the war itself the British troops occupied Philadelphia for a year or so their officers staged quite a lot of plays and created quite a lot of theatrical hoop dee doo to pass away their time, really  - BUT I’m going to cover that in a subsequent episode, I promise.  

Once the American forces re-occupied the city, the US Congress once again immediately banned plays in Philadelphia, and forbade American Army officers from attending it anywhere else. I will mention that in May of 1778, after the long hard winter the American Army spent in Valley Forge to the west of the city, a group of soldiers staged an amateur production of Addison’s Cato, that sober paean to duty and patriotism set in Ancient Rome. The army’s commander, General George Washington, was there in the audience, and by all accounts he enjoyed the heck out of that show. Now, this fact alone was eventually to bode well, in the long run, for the history of theater in Philadelphia.

It wasn’t until after the war was over . . . after the dust had settled, as it were . . .. and we were our own nation, and no longer a group of colonies, that anyone raised the idea of doing professional plays again. 

Lewis Hallam Jr., the son of the original founder who was now leading the  re-formed Hallam company (which now called itself “The Old American Company”) made many appeals to Congress to relax the laws against plays, but it wasn’t until the year 1789 that all national and local laws against plays were finally repealed. The Old Americans returned, after a long residency in Jamaica, and they performed in both Philadelphia and New York.

New York, of course, was the first capital of America. But, in 1790 the famous political compromise was struck that would make Philadelphia the national capital again for a period of ten years. George Washington, now President Washington, took up residence in the city. His appetite for theater - that had been so whetted by Addison’s Cato at Valley Forge - could now be fully indulged. The Old American Company, with a season organized by the comic actor of its troupe, now turned impresario, Thomas Wignell, put on a season of plays, concerts and moral lectures at the Southwark Theater, and Washington attended regularly. 

Above the stage he would have seen the motto “The Eagle Suffers the Little Birds to Sing.” - a reference to lifting of the former ban on performance. On evenings when Washington was present, well, Wignell would formally meet the President at the door when he arrived, and show him to a decorated special box. Soldiers would stand about the doors as guards. And the imprimatur of the great man did a great deal to confer respectability and prestige to the Theater and soon there were plans afoot to do even greater things.

Sensing this opportunity, Thomas Wignell broke off from The Old American Company, and formed a partnership with the musician Alexander Reinagle, and they decided to make a principal claim on the renewed prestige of the Philadelphia theatrical market. As the Congress and the President settled into the new capital city, a group of Philadelphia investors backed Wignell and Reinagle’s ambitious plan. 

The two men were soon recruiting a company of actors from England. They were collecting scripts, and costumes, and properties. And they started construction on what would soon become known as the “New Theatre,” built near the northeast corner of Sixth and Chestnut Streets, right near the political hub of the city - the State House where Congress and the Pennsylvania Legislature both met - was right on the next block. 

The theater was to be an elegant and commodious building that put the shoddy old Southwark Theatre to shame. The New Theatre was to have three tiers of fifteen boxes each, that all together could hold over 700 of the finer set of people, and with benches on the parquet floor in front of the stage, that gave it a total capacity of over 1100. 

There were French-style oil lamps that could be raised or even dimmed, depending on the requirements of the scene. And because it was somewhat smaller than many of the largest London houses, it reportedly had excellent acoustics, and allowed for a more intimate and direct acting style. 

The acting company that Wignell assembled was going to have their own dressing rooms (an innovation for American theater) and a Green Room for receiving their particular fans. 

One well-known London actress that Wignell eventually recruited in 1796, Mrs. Ann Merry, was known for both her beauty and her possession of a particularly melodious voice. She played leading roles such as Juliet and Ophelia and quickly became a favorite with Philadelphia audiences - adding to her public profile by riding about town in a chariot of ‘simple but elegant construction, drawn by two favored sorrel horses.” Her fees were reportedly up to a thousand guineas a season, in addition to her passage to and from England. Now, she was quite a catch for the young company, a true star. And she came along with Thomas Cooper, a leading tragedian, who however did not stay long in Philadelphia, finding better opportunities in New York - one of a long string of actors to do so. 

Wignell also recruited the actress Susanna Rowson, who was of a literary bent, and she wrote romantic plays for the company, including one entitled Slaves in Algiers, or a Struggle for Freedom.

The exterior of the Chestnut Street Theatre would eventually feature a classical front, but for many years it was not totally complete, however, and throughout the 1790s drawings of the building show a large sloping roof or awning which extended over the sidewalk all the way to the street, in order to protect arriving theater patrons from the rain and the snow. It is said the wealthy Philadelphians would follow the London habit of sending servants to secure their places for the evening’s performances, and would not arrive themselves until the fashionable last minute, so having easy access for their carriages was essential.

On February 17th, 1794, the New Theater opened its doors with the play The Castle of Andalusia, a romantic drama by John O’Keefe which featured striking scenic effects of Spanish castles, evidently. It was followed by the comic afterplay Who’s the Dupe? by Hannah Cowley. 

George Washington, once again, was an eager visitor to see the shows, which were only a short journey from the grand official residence where he was staying by that time, on Market Street. His arrival and presence in the house would have caused considerable notice amongst the crowd. We have to remember that in those days, the audience was lit just as brightly as the stage, and the enjoyment of a night out at the theater was just as much about viewing other members of the audience as it was viewing what was on the stage - who was there, what were they wearing? 

However, in an ominous sign for national comity, public disputes and arguments soon began to break out among rival political factions in the audience - and here you may well remember the budding rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and their supporters from the musical. 

Reinagle, leading the musicians in the pit, would be called upon to play various patriotic tunes before the show, and the audience would lustily sing along to support them, depending on whether they were Federalists or Republicans. Demonstrations and exchanges of catcalls broke out between the two sides. 

Washington, wanting to stay above the fray, as a matter of policy, and avoiding any appearance of joining the controversies, soon stopped attending the theater - which must have been a disappointment to Wignell and Reinagle, but there is no doubting that they did what they set out to do. The Chestnut Street Theater, in its various forms and under various managements, would continue to be a leading social and artistic presence in Philadelphia for decades to come.

And now we’ve done it - we’re at the end of the Eighteenth Century. That, ladies and gentlemen, is where we are going to leave it, on the cusp of a new era for Philadelphia Theater. That was quite a gallop to get all the way here, wasn’t it?

So . . to reward ourselves for all this hard historical work, in our next episode we are going across Chestnut Street to the Circus! 

I’m Peter Schmitz, chief cook and bottle washer of this podcast. The music and the sound engineering are all done by the wonderful Christopher Mark Colucci. Come back and join the fun next time on Adventures in Theater History, Philadelphia.